The Health Care Blog

Today's news today, doctors, Peel, and individual insurance

By Matthew Holt I just noticed that THCB today is all about last week and Sunday’s news—including Merrill Goozner and me jumping separately on the same magic quote in the NY Times CT piece. So how about three little pieces...

A classic from a cardiologist

By Matthew Holt The NY Times has a long piece on the fast spread of 64 slice CT scans and their using in cardiac imaging. This is all pretty much taken straight from Shannon Brownlee's fabulous book Overtreated which has...

Run for the hills: the doctors are coming

By Robert Laszewski What is the one thing no human being should want to be next week? A Republican Senator at a Fourth of July Picnic. In the most amazing turn of events I have seen in 20 years of...

Doctor fee stalemate exemplifies problems of universal health care

By Donald Johnson The thousands of physicians and millions of Medicare beneficiaries who think the government should provide “universal health care” insurance to all Americans are getting a good look at how ugly such a politically-driven scheme would be. Doctors...

NY Times examines CT scans and evidenced-based medicine

By Merrill Goozner The front page of the New York Times Sunday morning had a don't miss article on the financial incentives behind using CT scans to look for heart disease. Medicare's decided in March to begin paying for the...

Drug advertisements annoying and possibly misleading

By Sean Neill Sean Neill is a South African-born, British-trained anesthesiologist, who recently relocated to Midwestern USA. He blogs regularly at OnMedica about his cross-cultural experience, frequently pointing out oddities of American health care. Watching television in America takes some...

Should progressive reformers talk about reining in the cost of care?

By Maggie Mahar Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Barron's and Institutional Investor. She is the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason...

The mutli-factorial equation of individual insurance

By Matthew Holt I'm up at Spot-on talking about the perils of being in the individual insurance market and wondering whether I should get out. As ever, come back here to comment if you please. I want to ask your...

Markle promotes a privacy standard

By Matthew Holt The Markle Foundation put together a group creating a road map over the last few years and today they announced their new policy framework for privacy in PHRs and personal health information. In general this is a...

Universal access to high speed Internet

By Sarah Arnquist Achieving universal Internet access may happen well before we see universal access to health care -- at least if the advocacy group Internet for Everyone has its way. The Mercury News reports that a "broad coalition of...

Internet expert fields questions on participatory medicine

By Susannah Fox I always suspect that audience members have as much to share as I have to say. So when Mary Madden and I received an invitation to speak at the National Institutes of Health we created a participatory...

Check the WSJ opinion section for more BS on Medicare Advantage

By Matthew Holt Scott Gottlieb, who passes for what the right call a health economist these days, has an opinion piece in the WSJ singing the praises of Medicare Advantage plans. Anyone reading the article would think that Medicare Advantage...

Online bullying care management works

By Matthew Holt So says a study out in JAMA today from Group Health of Puget Sound. They randomly divided high blood pressure patients into three groups. Being Group Health members they all had online access to the MyGroupHealth site...

Can Connected Health survive the political economy of health care?

By Matthew Holt Jennifer Priester & Joe Kvedar over at Partners' Center for Connected Health asked me to step in and be the guest host of their discussion group for the month. I wrote a piece called, Can Connected Health...

Congress votes for higher Medicare costs when voting down competition

By Sarah Arnquist Congress is bowing to pressure (read: financial contributions) from medical equipment makers that stand to lose money if Medicare expands its competitive bidding program. The NY Times reports today that the House approved legislation Tuesday that would...

Lots of Health 2.0 articles indicates that it's heating up

By Matthew Holt I don't know if it's just me, but there appears to be a quick vogue in round-ups of the Health 2.0 world at the moment. UCLA doc John Luo wrote about The People and Companies Driving Health...

Expanding consumer ratings to home caregivers

By Chiara Bell It seems that everyone is chasing after doctor and hospital ratings. From Revolution Health to Yelp, consumers are encouraged to rate hospitals and physicians in their communities. Hospitals and physicians are the two obvious providers to rate...

How preventing infections rose to the forefront of the patient safety movement

By Bob Wachter The Joint Commission just released its 2009 National Patient Safety Goals, and –- no surprise –- they focus on infection prevention. While this seems natural today, it wasn’t always so. In fact, the conflation of infection control...

Consumers seek health information to solve marketplace problems

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Consumers, employers, payers and providers agree that information flows are critical to helping stem health care costs. While there is shared concern about health care costs, there is also a shared desire for more, accessible information and...

Health care is not recession-proof

By Jeff Goldsmith It is often accepted as conventional wisdom that health care is recession proof. People get sick regardless of economic cycles, and the publicly funded safety net programs insure that people who need care get it. Yet if...

Whose DNA is it anyway?

By Sarah Arnquist News of the California Health Department's mailing of cease and desist letters to 13 direct-to-consumer genetic testing firms, such as 23andMe, Navigenics and DeCodeMe, has sparked intense debate over balancing regulations to guarantee quality and individual rights...

Untangling the electronic health date exchange

By David Kibbe The purpose of this post is to help a non-technical audience untangle some of the confusion regarding health data exchange standards, and particularly come to a better understanding of the similarities and differences between the Continuity of...

Going Dutch for health reform ideas

By Maggie Mahar & Niko Karvounis Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Barron's and Institutional Investor. She is the author of Money-Driven Medicine:...

Diabetes reloaded

By THCB Staff To mark the advancements and ongoing journey in diabetic care DiabetesMine, an online community and resource for diabetics, created this video. The theme, Diabetes Reloaded, stands for "redefining not only the role of technology in managing chronic...

AMA endorses single-payer health care (sort of)

By Michael Millenson The American Medical Association has now added a second pillar to its national health care reform plan. The first pillar, of course, has always been “Don’t sue,” a sturdy principle that over the decades has led the...

The health wonks behind the candidates

By Sarah Arnquist Leading up to the November election, the health reform proposals of presumptive presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama will be analyzed, compared and critiqued until absolutely nothing original is left to say about them. The team...

RWJF launches new Web section to share quality strategies

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched a new section on its Web site last week aimed at sharing best practices for improving health care. The new Quality/Equality portion is full of engaging multimedia features and includes an expansive library of...

American Well: the first deal is with Hawaii Blues and HealthVault

By Matthew Holt When I left their party late Wednesday night my understanding was that that American Well had bought Microsoft and was moving all 85,000 employees to Hawaii. Apparently that was MaiTai confusion, and the real story is that...

From the AHIP fields....

Fun and games were had by all at the America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) conference yesterday. (BTW Now I have a real journalist working with me on THCB and she says I have to spell out those acronyms!!) Outside a...

MA plans won this round but future looks bleak

By Robert Laszweski Congressional Democrats tried to take a big bite out of private Medicare last week in an attempt to pay for an 18-month fix to the upcoming July 1 10.6 percent reduction in Medicare physician payments. The effort,...

Mckinsey smells opportunity in explaining health care

By Scott Shreeve McKinsey Quarterly released an interesting study this week under the moniker, “What Consumers Want in Health Care." The central theme of the publication was the large and growing opportunity for a new type of health care “infomediaries”...

Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or Less)

By THCB Staff FORBES: Fed Chief Ben Bernanke fans the flames of health reform. "It's not just balancing the federal budget; it's really a much broader question of the stability and strength of our economy over a longer period of...

Does Bernanke understand health care?

By Donald Johnson Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke’s freshman-level term paper on health care economics shows how little he knows about it. Here’s the evidence: He talks about the health care system in America as if there is one....

MARKETPLACE: U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion seeks eHealth fellow

The Health Communication and ehealth Team in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) is seeking an ehealth Fellow. This fellowship is offered in collaboration with the Association for Prevention Teaching...

The Talking Cure: moving patients to the center of care

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn The relationship between patients and doctors is fundamentally changing. Transparency in medical records, patients' accessibility to health information online, and online social media driving patient-to-patient conversations are some forces at the base of the future of health...

Grumpy doctors, but is it really worse now?

By Matthew Holt An essay in the NY times explains how terrible life is for doctors. Reimbursement is down, more time is spent arguing with managed care companies, there are more restrictions on the what they can prescribe, etc, etc....

Interest groups clash over doctor-owned specialty hospitals

By Donald Johnson Doctor-owned specialty hospitals deliver better quality of care, are more convenient for physicians and patients and take business away from not-for-profit and investor-owned general acute care hospitals, which have been trying to put them out of business...

Trusera, out of beta & different enough to be interesting

By Matthew Holt Keith Schorsch is a busy boy. Not only did he write a much commented piece about Google Health and PHRs on this very station last week, but he also popped by last week to tell me about...

I always thought art galleries were a waste of space...

By Matthew Holt until I saw this. Scroll down to the polka version of “A long way to the top.” Talk about a highway to hell!

JOB POST: PRODUCT MANAGER / Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, has immediate openings for seasoned Product Managers to support product development for Web and digital products aimed at consumers and employees.The product manager plays a key role in ensuring the strategic direction, design and on-time...

State regulators challenge the rights to your DNA

By Matthew Holt It is something of a surprise that it popped up this way, but the establishment challenge to Health 2.0 was going to start somewhere. And it appears to have started with two big states, New York &...

Stats can't explain everything; the anecdote remains relevant

By Maggie Mahar Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Barron's and Institutional Investor. She is the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason...

What do Johnny Cash and employer-based health care have in common?

By Robert Laszewski OK, maybe it's a stretch but bear with me. I heard a senior exec from a big health plan say the other day that it's hard to believe we will ever see the end of health insurance...

Health costs are small businesses' No. 1 problem

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn The cost of health insurance is the No. 1 problem cited by small business owners. Health costs beat gas prices -- the No. 2 most severe problem cited by small business, in a March 2008 survey. This...

Obama's Rx for Change

By Matthew Holt Clinton has quit, Obama has three times McCain's resources, and the country is fed up with the Republicans' war, corruption and toadying to corporations. Democrats have won three "safe" Republican house seats in recent months. It's their...

And the Voters Demand. . . Electronic Medical Records?

By CRAIG STOLTZ Over half of Americans think the next U.S. President should support. . .access to electronic medical records. Compared to gas prices, the economy and the war in Iraq, this is, needless to say, a fairly minor issue....

It's a Greene world at Ix!

Here are three Greenes. Left to right Jeff (MedEncentive), Sarah (NY Times), Alan (DrGreene.com)

Kaiser, Blues of Mass....health plans & consumers online

Kaiser Permanente put out a new survey updating one they did last year which says that more and more people are going online, and now a sizable minority had a preference for doctors using an EMR. (It’s not clear whether...

Denials, denials!

By Matthew Holt Health minister “denies she is crazy”. OK she's Australian, so take that with a grain of salt. What's the fuss about? Using more allied professionals to replace primary care docs. Apparently that’s not certifiable, even in Australia.

Managing obesity, Japanese style

By Matthew Holt So after making cracks about Strength through Joy last week, it appears that plans to change the health of the nation are happening. Not here of course, but the NY Times tells us about Japan: Under a...